The best of the week's science and technology long reads, including a new idea for fighting communicable diseases, the pitfalls of modern parenting and TripAdvisor’s secret weapon.
Economics | Moore’s curse
Moore’s Law is a dangerous rule of thumb. It leads to exaggerated expectations. “The doubling time for transistor density is no guide to technical progress generally. Modern life depends on many processes that improve rather slowly, not least the production of food and energy and the transportation of people and goods.” Established technologies typically produce gains in performance of 1.5% to 3% a year. (Vaclav Smil, IEEE Spectrum, 612 words)
Death | The science of near-death experiences
People who come very close to clinical death often remember it as a spiritual adventure. They report voices, euphoria, floating outside the body, being in a magical realm. Either they glimpsed the next world, or their brains were doing something weird. Go with the first explanation and you have a best-selling book. Go with the second and you have a neurological problem: What causes the near-death experience? (Gordon Lichfield, The Atlantic, 7,800 words)
Disease | Darpa has a solution to Ebola
The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has a fix for Ebola and all communicable diseases. You isolate antibodies from survivors of a given disease, encode the plans for making those antibodies in RNA, and inject the RNA into people who might encounter the disease. Their bodies start manufacturing more of the antibodies. It’s fast and cheap. It scales. It sounds too good to be true. But these are the people who brought us the internet. (Alexis Madrigal, Fusion, 3,588 words)
Science | Pseudoscience
Philosopher Stephen Law discusses “dodgy” systems of belief, including the church of Christian Science and homeopathy, which falsely claim to be scientific. “There remain many mysteries. Many may be beyond our ability to solve. That’s all fine. I don’t say that you should only ever believe something if you’ve got really good evidence for it. But I do say you shouldn’t pretend that you’ve got good evidence when you haven’t.” (Nigel Warburton, Five Books, 3,690 words)
Psychology | An age of irrational parenting
America’s streets are safer than they have been for decades. So why are parents and police so nervous about children going out on their own? One reason may be the sense that there are “fewer eyes” watching over them: “It can’t entirely be an accident that fears about child safety have risen in tandem with women’s workforce participation”. But mainly, parents are having fewer children later in life, so they value them more highly. (Jennifer Senior, New York Magazine, 1,030 words)
Communication | The world of TripAdvisor
How TripAdvisor keeps the hotel industry on its toes: Loudsourcing. If the shower-head doesn’t work you can tell the world about it. TripAdvisor has 200 million comments on its website and adds 115 every minute. Customer ratings are mainly indexed to value: “For what I paid, how delighted was I?” Service is the key variable. Branding counts for little. “The number-one hotel in a major market is often not the hotel you would expect.” (Tom Vanderbilt, Outside, 5,020 words)
Technology | How Apple makes the watch
Geek heaven. Industrial designer scrutinises the metal-working technologies used to make the Apple Watch, and is dazzled. “I see a process that could only have been created by a team looking to execute on a level far beyond what was necessary or what will be noticed. This isn’t a supply chain, it is a ritual Apple is performing to bring themselves up to the standards necessary to compete against companies with centuries of experience.” (Greg Koenig, Atomic Delights, 4,460 words)
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